8 areas of your house you can easily declutter before Christmas

1. Entrance Hall
Often the entrance hall gets left as the place where we hang coats and drop off  
shoes.  Even if you have a small hallway 
- like I do - it does not have to be overrun by every coat and shoe in the house..
Begin here with the charity shop bag and throw in anything too small or just not being used anymore.  
Folks need one warm coat for a cold day with no rain, and one waterproof jacket; they can be one and the same.

In a box can be gloves in pairs, hats and scarves. 
We keep wellies here but all other pairs of shoes go to our bedrooms, as the 
hallway is small.


Everything else is either taken to 
bedrooms now, or put in the bag to be taken to the charity shop.


2. Lounge

This room is for sitting and chilling out in.  Take out everything that does not live in this room.  If you watch TV here, that is fine; but do you need to have 
shelves of DVDs on view? 

3. DVDs on shelves.
I see many lounges where the bookcases are stuffed full of DVDs. We keep ours in a sideboard, and when we have watched a DVD we won't see again, it goes in the charity bag.  If you have lots of DVDs, spend half an hour sorting though them into the charity 
bag and making some space on those shelves.  
The same with books.  
We used to have books filling shelves; now we have books we will read, and when they have been read we pop them in the charity bag.

Your lounge should contain somewhere to sit, somewhere for a cup of coffee to go, a TV if that is your thing, and nothing that is not related to the lounge.


4. Kitchen
Have a cardboard box ready as well as the charity bag for this room.
Start with your food cupboards.  
Which items of food are you just not going to eat? A tin of stewed fruit? A 
curry sauce you bought two of, but you didn't like the first one...? Anything you have in packets or tine that you just won't use, out in the cardboard box. The next time you go shopping to a supermarket, take this and out the items in the homeless collection before 
you begin shopping. Someone will be grateful of the food you have given.
Now sort through your cupboards, making a note of the meals you can make easily with what you have. Stick a list inside the cupboard door if you  wish.
Move to your storage cupboards.

5. Storage cupboards
You really only need to keep the pans at you use. The same with roasting dishes.
Put anything you don't use into the charity box/bag. 
Tackle the  cutlery drawer. Do the same here.

6. Personal paperwork.
If you have a pile of paperwork - where does it live in your house? Make a cup of tea and deal with it now. Throw out what is not  essential. Put away what you need to keep. Deal with what needs dealing with.

7. Bathroom
Sort through the washing items you have here. What is actually being used? 
One toothbrush per person, one tube of toothpaste for adults, one for children.
One large towel hanging up drying, personal  flannels and one hand towel present. 
You don't need more than one large and one small towel in your bathroom at a time. Reason? You use a towel to get dry WHEN YOU ARE CLEAN. Therefore it is only used to dry off water. Towels don't need washing daily, they need drying off inbetween use..
Using a small basket to store items being used daily - shower gel, dry flannels, spa loo roll, etc - the bathroom should be fairly easy to tidy and keep tidy.

8. Bedroom
Put away all clean clothes.
Look through clothes.
Take out each hanger. What do you not wear anymore? Put it in the charity bag.
Do you have something you feel you should wear because it cost a lot of money, but you just don't wear it?
Put it in the charity bag. You don't ear it. Keeping it is not going to take back how much you spent on it.
You could try to sell it on eBay, or you could just learn from it and give it away to a good cause.
Look over your shoes.
What you don't wear put in the charity bag.
Look over the bedroom.
Only have bedroom things in the bedroom.


This tidying might take you - little by little - all week, but it will make space, will get rid of unessential items, and I haven't even started on tidying out kids rooms or toy cupboards....


Do you have tidying tips you can share below?
Let's help each other get our houses ready for Christmas....!